News

“Fully immersive iPod-like device” concept

By Dennis Lloyd ● Thursday, March 18, 2004

KDLAB, a design firm in New York produced an astounding peice of work known as iSPEC or iPod3. Imagine you’re wearing 3D glasses with built-in earphones which immmerses you into a virtual reality environment of your choosing. In this case a reproduction of the Overlook Hotel’s lobby from the movie “The Shining” by Stanley Kubric. As you wear the glasses you manipulate the interface and environments appearing in the glasses by using wireless, finger mounted controls. We had recently placed this concept in our iPod Concepts gallery and have noticed it has appeared on several websites since. We emailed the producer, director and 3D designer/animator of iSPEC, Joseph Kosinski of KDLAB after viewing the concept video.

“The short film you saw, “iSPEC”, was a short film/spec project done for a couple of reasons: 1] to explore the idea of a fully immersive iPod-like device and potentially generate some commercial business 2] to push the limits of 3DS Max 6 and Mental Ray which I was beta testing at the time. The spot was first shown at SIGGRAPH 2003 at discreet Evolve event and has since been shown at the RES magazine screening series in Los Angeles. The video was produced at KDLAB in New York City in June 2003.”

22

The glasses are elegant, the presentation is mediocre and the interface is downright unintuitive and ugly. The words are floating in space in random order. It doesn’t feel like an elegant Apple interface.